President Obama recently remarked that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol (a sign of more lax federal enforcement?). But former Rep. Patrick Kennedy has now countered, saying,

In fact, today’s [marijuana is] modern, genetically modified marijuana, so its much higher THC [tetrahydrocannabinol] levels far surpass the marijuana that the president acknowledges smoking when he was a young person.… He is wrong when he says that it isn’t very harmful, because the new marijuana is not the old marijuana.

Kennedy believes, of course, that the government must crack down on pot smokers to save them from this deadly modern marijuana. But why exactly did pot get so much stronger? Well, for that you might want to check out BK Marcus’s Freeman article from last year, where he hit it on the nose:

If you prohibit a drug, the potency of that drug on the black market will increase.